I asked if it was just my county that he was not going to be able to supply thinking that I would just purchase another county.  Unfortunately he is just halting his lead business because he got tired of having his employees flake out on him and then having to retrain a new person over and over again.  I can’t say I blame him.

Where does this leave me?

Well for starters it gives me $97 more to pump into sending out mailers.  And because of my mastermind group and coaching I know exactly where I’m going to be spending that money.  Here is the plan…

1. Concentrate my efforts on Out-Of-State owners.  I can build these lists myself using the tax records
2. Exhaust the probate lists I still do have
3. Work on ways to build Evictions
4. Build my own probate lists

If this were to happen a couple months ago I would have been dead in the water.  But now I have a plan in place and I think this is actually going to make me re-examine my business and make better use of my funds.   With the additional money I can spend on sending out mailings, I’ll be able to send out twice as much.

Last but certainly not least, Lance and I have decided to work together.  He recently lost his job, so he has time to do the things that I’ve had trouble doing because of my JOB.  He has no money however, so I’ll be supplying much of our monthly marketing expenses.   Lance also lives about an hour south of me which means we can cover a larger area of New Jersey.

We met tonight and laid out a plan and divided up the tasks as best we could.  This may be the turning point for both of us, or it may fail miserably.  I think this “partnership” is going to work great and I’m really excited about putting our plan into affect.  I wouldn’t be surprised when we look back over this year, this day will be viewed as the key to both of our success.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Related posts:

1. Probate Monday: Getting My Gangster On
2. Probate Monday: Using A Greeting Card Envelope
3. Probate Monday: Sending Out Mailers Using SI Lead Manager

Snow Snow Snow

Lance and I were planning on putting out some bandit signs tomorrow morning.   Well that is not going to happen now because we are getting a snow storm of about 3 to 6 inches.  On top of that my wife told me we are going to be getting a Nor-Easter on Tuesday that is going to dump some serious snow on us as well.  So we decided to postpone the early morning gangster action until next weekend.   I really don’t want to go through the hard work of putting out signs only to have them buried when the snow plows clear the roads.   Do you agree?

Probate Letters

To replace not putting out bandit signs this weekend, I’m going to put the final touches on my December probate letters and then start creating my January mailings.  Gotta keep doing stuff that is going to make me some money right?

Presented SI Lead Manager

This past Wednesday I had an REI meeting (I’ll call this group the Sparta REI Group from now on).   I took the opportunity to demonstrate my SI Lead Manager software to the members.  It went very well and they all really liked what I have done.  My goal with the program is to show it to as many people as I can until I find that one person who can get behind it and promote it to their people.

I am also going to demonstrate the program to the Lindon REI Group at the end of the month.  This is Jon Zorrer’s group and maybe if he likes it, he’ll recommend it to others.  I also had a thought about trying to get Vena Jones-Cox to get behind the effort since she is really close friends with Jon.  Hey you never know right?

All told, there have been over 200 people who have downloaded SI Lead Manager!  I’m supper excited about that because the more people that use it and give me feedback the better the software will become.  I’m currently linking it up with Click2Mail so you can just have them send your postcards with one click (ok maybe 2 clicks) of your mouse.

What are you doing this week to make money?

Related posts:

1. How Many Calls Do 14 Bandit Signs Bring?
2. How Many Bandit Signs Can Two People Put Up In 2 Hours?
3. Everyone Raves About Bandit Signs, Should They?

This week I will be getting back into REI and getting out of my lazy day mindset I have fallen into over the holidays.  I love vacations, but they really get me out of rhythm.  I am not some one who adapts quickly, it takes me time to get use to a change in my routine.  Here is my quick plan for this week to get me back in the swing of things.

1. Send out my back log of mailers
2. put out bandit signs Saturday morning

Book Give Away

In an effort to clean out some of the clutter, I pulled out some books that I have read in the past.  These are all great books, but are a little repetitive with other great books I have so I want to give them away.  If you want one of the books just leave a message with the book title you want and I will mail it to you.  First person who calls it gets it and only one book per person.

• Business Plans for Dummies
• Real Estate Loop-Holes (Rich Dad Series) by Diane Kennedy and Garrett Sutton
• Buying Real Estate Foreclosures by Melissa S. Kollen-Rice gone to Brandi Williams
• The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller gone to Matt Grosdidier
• Million Dollar Habits by Brian Tracy gone to Joel Springer

and for those techie people

• Car PC Hacks by Damien Stolarz
• Build Your Own Car PC by Gavin D.J. Harper

Both these books really helped me put a computer in my old car and it worked great.

Have a great day everyone!

Related posts:

1. First Probate Call! and Give Away Week!

Staying active is a benefit on two fronts.  First it keeps me active and thinking about real estate investing during this slow down period.  I’ve always found that once a break a routine, in this case putting together my mailers, I find it hard to re-motivate myself.  It’s very much like how hard it is to push a car when it’s standing still as opposed to when you’ve already got it moving.

On the second front, I’ll have a great big stack of mailers already for me to mail out come January.  This sure beats having that stack of “To-Do” items waiting for for me coming out of the break.  Counting off the top of my head, I should have roughly 300 letters to send out.  Which reminds me, I’ve got to go re-up my subscriptions to the post office so they continue to send me 100 stamps per month.

What else is going on?

For those that don’t know, I just released an update to my SI Lead Manager software (v 1.3.1.0) which added some new features and fixed some bugs that have been reported to me.

note: For those people using a 64 bit operating system like Windows 7 x64, I am still trying to figure out how to modify my code to make it work on your computers.  It’s difficult because I don’t have a 64 bit computer of my own.

New Feature: Custom Fields

You now have the ability to add up to 30 custom fields to the program.  These fields will act exactly like the standard fields, so you can import into them, modify the values as well as export and mail merge them into your letters.  Watch this Tutorial Video that demonstrates this feature…

New Feature: Automatic Update Notification

As you open the program, it will make a quick call to my website to see if there are any new updates that have been released.  If there are you will be prompted with a window that gives you information about the new update as well as a link to download it.

The window will show you your Current Version (1.3.0.0) and the new version that is available to download.

As will all updates, it will preserve the current information in your database.  It is a good idea to make a copy of the database before executing any updates because you just never know.

New Feature: Importing into and Existing List

In previous versions you could only import leads into a new list.  You would then have to then go into the new list and move those leads to an existing list.  Now you can  select an existing list or create a new list when importing.

New Feature: Not Filtering (i.e. give me everything except)

When filtering leads by a column, it will now allow for NOT notation (! – exclamation point).  For example if I have a list of leads and I want to see all the leads with a mailing address not in NJ I can type in ‘!NJ’.  Have a look

New Feature: Quick View Info on Calendar

And more….

To download SI Lead Manager, simple fill in the form to the right and await the email with directions on how to download the program.

Related posts:

1. Probate Monday: First on the List!
2. Probate Monday: Using A Greeting Card Envelope
3. Probate Monday: Lead Tracker

I chose a road the night before and we just drove until it got light.  I put bandit signs on all entrance and exit ramps onto the route that I could find.  All toll we put out 14 signs, which is 10 more then our previous record of 4.   We would have put more out, but there was a long stretch of road where there was nothing but business front property.   I probably have gotten about 5 or 6 calls from the signs so far, most of them being hangups after a few seconds.  Two people left messages and I will be calling them back tomorrow.

Probate Mailer Results

My 75 probate mailers, with greeting card envelope, got me 3 calls.  Two of which were people not very happy to get my letter and asked to be take off the list.  The other person, I actually got an email from a friend of mine who said their Aunt and Uncle received a letter from me.  My friend is a Realtor and has the house listed, in fact we went to licensing school at the same time.  They are interested in selling the house and I’m going to take a look at the MLS listing and come up with an offer for the house and give it to my friend.   Could be a win win.

That’s about it for last week.  This week I’m planning on getting some more Out-of-State owner mailings out.  Since it is a holiday week, I’m going to be holding off sending these new letters until next Monday.

Related posts:

1. Probate Monday #4 – Is Real Estate Involved?
2. Probate Monday: Letters Sent
3. Probate Monday: Forcing Yourself Out of The Comfort Zone

What Jon and Kasey do during the holiday period is continue to build lists, prepare the mail pieces and get them ready to send.  Then they put them aside and wait till January to send them out.  I’m going to follow there suggestions.  Anyone else have a similar experience with this time of year?

Back to my current batch of probate mail.  As I mentioned I changed up the envelope from a standard #10 to a greeting card size envelope.  Below is a picture of the exact envelopes I used and am using

This is the Standard #10 envelope that I was using before.

• Height: 4.125 in.
• Width: 9.5 in.

Here is the new envelope that I used this time.

• Height: 4.375 in.
• Width: 5.75 in.

If you want more information about what envelope sizes are available you can go here: Envelope Type Chart

My one worry is that it will appear to personal and less professional.  I wonder if that will make more look like more of a sleaze bag by almost tricking them into opening my letter?  Well I’ll give it a shot and prepare for some not so pleasant phone calls.   That’s why I have the phone service and voice mail message though right?  To filter out those people who aren’t really motivated.

Out-Of-State Owners

Recently my coach sent me a how to on pulling out the out of state owners from the local tax records.  I picked out for towns in my area and have created the list and will be mailing them out soon.  This could add about 120 more mailers a month for me.  Once I get the system down I will right a post about how exactly I’m doing it.  Although it could be different depending on where you live and if you can export your tax records to a useable file type like excel or csv.

Hope everyone is making progress like I am.  Look for a video tomorrow going through some features of my lead management software, I’m all done coding and am in the process of creating the setup package.

Related posts:

1. Probate Monday #9: Follow Up Post Card
2. Probate Monday: What I’m using for my postcards
3. Probate Monday: Sending Out Mailers Using SI Lead Manager

This weekend was a productive weekend as I went out to visit the Tall Timber house with Lance (a fellow student of Jon Zorrer’s).  Lance is pretty good with spotting what needs to be repaired and together we came up with a repair cost for this house.  With our estimates, it turned out it was going to cost more then my initial guesstimate of 50,000 k.  Here is the break down of the figures…

That is 50% more then my estimate so It is good that I went back. I’m sure some of these numbers might be over estimated but I wanted to error on the side of caution. Going with three scenarios, based on the % Mark Down of the standard wholesaling formula I came up with these possible offers…

• Offer #1:  550,000k  (arv) * 70% (md) - 74,000 (repairs) – 20,000 (my fee) = $290,300
• Offer #2:  550,000k   *  80% - 74,000  – 20,000  = $345,300
• Offer #3:  550,000k   *  75% - 74,000  – 20,000  = $317,800
• Offer #4: 550,000k   *  65% - 74,000  – 20,000  = $262,800

My normal percentage for figuring out my offer is 70%, but I wonder if with higher priced homes I can confidently use a lower mark down.  I’ve got a call into Jon to see if I can for this particular area.  If I don’t hear from him by tomorrow I’m going to go with 70%  and make that offer to the seller.

I would have made the offer today, but when I got home from work I found that the power was out in the entire town so I had no access to my computer for the numbers or the guys phone number.  I also had to get my dog out of the house because he gets terrified by the beeping firing alarm.  The poor little guys heart races.

I will leave you with some pictures of the house..

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Related posts:

1. What is The After Repair Value?
2. Goals for week 6/8 to 6/14
3. The Run Down House In A Nice Area

How Can I Help You?

You’ve probably heard this before and so have I, but for some reason I’ve forgotten this simple advice.  You copy should only include ways you can help your target out, not include features detailing what you offer.  Such features are

• I buy houses
• I can close quickly
• All cash offers

Your basic message should hit the rough spot of the lead.  You want to make their life easier, reduce their problems and help them.  For those people who are marketing for probates, think about what problems do people who inherit a house have?

• Stop the constant driving back and forth, wasting hours of your weekend
• Spending thousands of dollars just to fix the place up so you can sell it, maybe?
• Need to pay off some debt by the end of the month, but there is no way you can sell the house that quickly?

Any one else know of a problem area that can be solved?

Filter Your Probate Lead Lists

Building a probate list can be as simple as going to the court house and writing down all the names and address for each case file.  You’ll get calls from your marketing by mailing to this list, but the responses rate will be very low.  Why is that?  There are a few reasons why and some good and simple tricks to get a really direct, targeted list.

1. Make sure the probate file has real estate in it.  This is as easy as cross checking the deceased name and address in the county tax records.
2. Don’t Mail to Spouses or Parents.  99% of the time a husband, wife, father or mother of the deceased is not going to be happy that you are sending them mail asking to buy their loved ones property.  Take these people off your list and save yourself the heart ache of being yelled at and called a “Scum sucking pond feeder”.
3. Only mail to Out of State Executors.  Most of my responses so far have been from executors who live out of state.  This one is up to you if you really want to save some money and increase your quality response rate.

By doing these filter techniques, you’ll be saving money because you aren’t sending mail to leads who have nothing to sell you.  You’ll be saving time because you won’t be putting the extra mailers together or answering unmotivated calls.  Last but not least you’ll be greatly increasing your response rates.

Proper Letter Structure

Your letter is your advertisement.  The most successful advertising campaigns speak to how you can solve a problem or need.  That isn’t all though, people are very suggestive by nature and sometimes need a little push in order to take action.  Even after a push they may even need a little enticing to push that final digit on the phone.  A good letter will have the following structure…

• Part #1: Mention their pain, the problem they may be having.  If you can get someone to say “yes that is my problem”  you’ve hooked them and they will read further.
• Part #2: Call to Action.  Tell them to call you at 123-555-0000 to find out how to solve their problem
• Part #3: Solution. Let them know there is a solution to the problem
• Part #4: Call to Action. Tell them to call you before putting down the letter
• Part #5: Offer them something if they call.  Tell them to “Ask about your 48 hours Offer” or “Ask about the free probate report”.

These are some very simple yet powerful marketing techniques that will put you ahead of many real estate investors in your area.

Related posts:

1. Probate Monday: Decent response rate but frustrated
2. Probate Monday: Letters Sent
3. Probate Monday (On Wednesday): More Letters Going Out

I’m not setting up anything big, just throwing out an example for those people who are just getting started out.  Sometimes it takes a while for people to call.  In this particular case I got a call last Thursday (3 weeks after mailing) about a house in Morris Township.  The owner lives out of state, but just happened to be at the house.  I would have shot over there but it was my Mom’s birthday so I was headed over to my parents house to celebrate that.    The owner of the house said he wasn’t ready to sell the house yet, but would call me back to let me know when he’d be up again.

He doesn’t really sound motivated from our short conversation, but I will do my best to bring out any motivation from him when we talk again.  I’ll probably end up going to the house because it is right around the corner from where I live.  My main goal will be to get a price he’d be willing to sell at and then I’ll bring it up to Jon to see if something could be worked out.  A great way to take advantage of a coach right?

Since September is coming to an end I’m going to start preparing for October’s mailing so this week will be full of printing, stuffing, licking and stamping (get your mind out of the gutters!).

Related posts:

1. Probate Monday #6 – What to say when they call?
2. Probate Call Number 2! and More
3. Probate Monday: Gearing Up for Another Mailing

Option #1:  Keep up with Probates, but switch my target market

It may make some sense to concentrate my limited marketing funds into one area.  Since I’m going to be putting up bandit signs in Mercer County, it might benefit me more to send out mailers to that county as well.  The list would cost the same and I may even get more leads that way.  I’ll have to discuss this option with my coach and my lead source.

Option #2: Try and resell my Morris County leads to Realtors or other investors for a slight profit.

This is an intriguing option as it could lead to some more marketing money.  I posted an ad on craigslist today to test the market out.  I’m willing to sell the leads for $1 each or for $3 each if the buyer wants exclusivity. I’ve attempted to re-sell the leads before with little success, but I think I gave up to soon.

Option #3: Stop marketing to probates and concentrate all my marketing dollars to bandit signs

This is a real option, but I hate giving up on something and that is exactly what I would be doing.  I know probate investing can work out and if I get a deal in my Morris County it could be quite good.  The only question is how long will it take?  The market in Mercer County is much more favorable in terms of housing zones (2 and 3) while Morris County is mostly 4s, 5s and 6s.  If you aren’t sure what the zones are it basically breaks down to this according to Steve Cook…

• Zone 1: War zones
• Zone 2: Fringe of war zones
• Zone 3: Mix of renters and owners
• Zone 4: Mostly home owners
• Zone 5: Few Renters and a lot of “pride of ownership”
• Zone 6: Tough to find fixer uppers (rentals are top dollar)
• Zone 7: Very hard to find fixer uppers.  The residents here can usually afford to take care of their homes. Retail buyers will pay top dollar for fixer uppers
• Zone 8: Deals are typically very difficult to find in these types of areas

Option #4: Continue Marketing to Morris County Probates

I’m seriously leaning towards not doing this, but they always say when you are about to give up just go a little further and success will be right there.

So what does everyone thing??

Related posts:

1. Probate Monday #5 – Make Money From Your Leads
2. Probate Monday – Week #1 Update – Ron Mead
3. Probate Monday – Finding the Deceased – Part #1